Thursday, June 19, 2008

The following is the conclusion of "Truth About Islam In Europe," a lengthy and excellent article from the Brussels Journal.

The article refutes many of the claims of how the ignorant Europeans received much of their knowledge from the Muslim countries from the south, and provides an answer as to why those countries went into a deep and centuries long decline despite the lack of any significant invasions from the Christian world.

The article is worth opening and reading. It should be required reading by every high school senior and college freshman. Especially those in the liberal arts/poly sci programs.

I've recently been re-reading some of the books of American evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond, including Guns, Germs, and Steel. What strikes me is how Diamond, with his emphasis on historical materialism, fails to explain the rise of the West and especially why English, not Arabic, Chinese, Sanskrit or Mayan, became the global lingua franca. His most important flaw is his complete failure to explain how the Greater Middle East went from being a center of civilization to being a center of anti-civilization. This was not caused by smallpox or because zebras are more difficult to domesticate than water buffaloes. It was caused by Islam. Yet is striking to notice how Diamond totally ignores the influence of Islam. This demonstrates clearly that any historical explanation that places too much emphasis on material issues and too little on the impact of human ideas is bound to end up with false or misleading conclusions.

In case you missed this, you might want to print a copy and send it to your favorite Leftie whose latest excuse for his party's despicable actions regarding energy is to claim that we don't have enough to make a difference.

America is sitting on top of a super massive 200 billion barrel Oil Field that could potentially make America Energy Independent and until now has largely gone unnoticed. Thanks to new technology the Bakken Formation in North Dakota could boost America’s Oil reserves by an incredible 10 times, giving western economies the trump card against OPEC’s short squeeze on oil supply and making Iranian and Venezuelan threats of disrupted supply irrelevant.

In the next 30 days the USGS (U.S. Geological Survey) will release a new report giving an accurate resource assessment of the Bakken Oil Formation that covers North Dakota and portions of South Dakota and Montana. With new horizontal drilling technology it is believed that from 175 to 500 billion barrels of recoverable oil are held in this 200,000 square mile reserve that was initially discovered in 1951. The USGS did an initial study back in 1999 that estimated 400 billion recoverable barrels were present but with prices bottoming out at $10 a barrel back then the report was dismissed because of the higher cost of horizontal drilling techniques that would be needed, estimated at $20-$40 a barrel.

It was not until 2007, when EOG Resources of Texas started a frenzy when they drilled a single well in Parshal N.D. that is expected to yield 700,000 barrels of oil that real excitement and money started to flow in North Dakota. Marathon Oil is investing $1.5 billion and drilling 300 new wells in what is expected to be one of the greatest booms in Oil discovery since Oil was discovered in Saudi Arabia in 1938.

Tim was a big proponent of diversity, but he wanted to go further than the usual stuff. "I am for having women in the newsroom and minorities in the newsroom -- I'm all for it. It opens up our eyes and gives us different perspectives. But just as well, let's have people with military experience; let's have people from all walks of life, people from the top-echelon schools but also people from junior colleges and the so-called middling schools -- that's the pageantry of America . . . You need cultural diversity, you need ideological diversity. You need it."

I think that is absolutely one of the most important points I have ever read on the subject.

You can run pine logs through a lumber mill and get 2 x 4's. You can run oak logs through a lumber mill and get 2 x 4's. And that's the point.

Loading up with people from the same schools and the same backgrounds is not diversity, no matter what their color or gender. You get a color/gender view from the same point. And no, it's not a conspiracy. It's just that everyone "knows" the same thing, the same people, go to the same restaurants, the same movies, etc.

And that's worse than an actual conspiracy because in a conspiracy some of the members might realize they are wrong and reform. Now you have a conspiracy based on ignorance of the rest of the country and the real world.

And that's as deadly as a one year old trying to pet Daddy's pet boa constrictor. The child knows it's okay. He saw Daddy feed it. He knows the snake is hungry and eats small animals. But he doesn't know that the snakle sees him as a small animal.